Microsoft reports record revenue, lackluster Windows sales

Business apps offering most returns

Microsoft has released its numbers for its most recent quarter, which show revenue growth of seven per cent over the same period last year. Its strongest growth on the back of sales of its Office suite.

Overall revenues rose to $17.37 billion for the year, with Redmond's business division showing overall growth of eight per cent for the year to $5.62 billion, with double digit growth for Lync, SharePoint, Exchange, and Dynamics. The server and tools division posted revenue growth of 10 per cent, but the Windows division had the lowest growth at just two per cent, against a background of falling PC sales.

"We had another strong quarter for Office, SharePoint, Exchange, and Lync, and saw growing demand for our public and private cloud services including Office 365, Dynamics CRM Online, and Windows Azure,” said Microsoft COO Kevin Turner in a statement. "With a great set of consumer products like Windows 7 PCs, Windows Phone 7.5, Xbox and Kinect, we are excited about the holiday buying season.”

The search engine Bing saw good growth, and now has 14.7 per cent of searches, which rises to 27 per cent when including searches from Yahoo! and others using Redmond’s search engine.

Xbox sales had a bumper year, as the top-selling games console for nine months, and Microsoft is hoping Gears of War 3 will help continue this lead, although it’s not clear if Microsoft makes any profit on its Xbox hardware. ®